The Moral Matter of Childbearing

In December 1941, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Hers was not a wanted pregnancy; we know from her diaries that she had never desired children, and had even considered a hysterectomy “in a rash and pleasure-loving moment.” Hillesum wanted above all to be a writer. Like many women before (and after) her, Hillesum self-managed her abortion; she mentions swallowing “twenty quinine pills” and assaulting herself with “hot water and blood-curdling instruments.” She left behind an account not just of her methods, but of her reasoning. “All I want is to keep someone out of this miserable world. I shall leave you in a state of unbornness, rudimentary being that you are, and you ought to be grateful to me. I almost feel a little tenderness for you,” she wrote. Hillesum was aware of the dire political circumstances around her, but her rationale was entirely personal. As she explained to the entity growing within her, her “tainted family” was “riddled with hereditary disease.” She swore that “no such unhappy human being would ever spring from my womb.”

Eighty-three years later, the Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt looks to Hillesum in contemplating a central question she believes that everyone must attempt to answer for themselves: that of whether or not to have children. In her new book, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?, van der Lugt locates in Hillesum’s words no less than “the beginning of an ethics of creation,” an earnest wrestling with the act of bringing a new person into the world. She argues that childbearing is too often framed as a matter of desire and capacity—wanting or not wanting children, being able or unable to have them—when it should be a moral one. Procreation, she proposes, is a “problem—a personal, ethical and philosophical problem, especially in a secular age.” Perhaps, she ventures, it is “the greatest philosophical problem of our time.”

Asking such a question in an era when two-thirds of the global population live in places with fertility rates below replacement level may seem counterintuitive (and to pronatalist policy makers, downright counterproductive). Clearly, many people of reproductive age have decided against parenthood, even though it is still the far more common path. (Decades after contraception was legalized for unmarried people in the U.S., more than 84 percent of women in their 40s had given birth.) But van der Lugt is less interested in the outcomes, and even in the reasons people give for having or not having children, than in the question itself. At the core of her argument are two facts: First, that a person cannot consent to being born, and second, that there is a high likelihood they will experience at least some suffering in their lifetime. As incontrovertible as these assertions are, I’ve rarely heard people outside of environmentalist circles talk about their hypothetical children in these terms.

These two facts, van der Lugt maintains, should be sufficient to trouble common assumptions about begetting—chief among them the notion that having children is inherently good. She wants her readers to reconsider the language people use about childbearing, which usually revolves around choice or preferences. Instead, she argues, begetting “should be seen as an act of creation, a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible”: Hardly something one should undertake without pausing to examine why.

In her 20s, van der Lugt looked around her peer group and saw people becoming parents without what appeared to be much consideration, sometimes, “seemingly, just for fun.” One day, at a restaurant in Rotterdam, a friend she calls Sylvia tells her, “I actually believe having children is immoral.” Sylvia reasons that because “life always contains some suffering”—ordinary or severe mental or physical illness, emotional pain, and all sorts of other potential harms—bringing a child into the world inevitably adds to that misery. Van der Lugt is shocked, and unconvinced by Sylvia’s argument. The two begin an ongoing debate about the morality of childbearing, which is eventually joined by a third friend. These discussions spur van der Lugt to reexamine her long-held assumptions, a process that forms the basis of the book.

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Van der Lugt draws on a wide and eclectic mix of sources as she builds her arguments. Among them: Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery, for its explicit connection of “the problem of suffering and evil” to procreation, and Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, in which one character asserts that being a friend is enough to make a meaningful existence. Insights from popular media such as The West Wing and The Hunger Games are put in conversation with the work of philosophers including Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Sandel, and the early ecologist Peter Wessel Zapffe.

She begins by examining the ideas of several antinatalist philosophers. Antinatalists come in many stripes, ranging from those who believe that humans threaten the well-being of nonhuman animals and the environment to some who are simply misanthropic; the most worthwhile of these arguments, van der Lugt believes, are the ones that are grounded in concern for the welfare of fellow people. She engages extensively with the controversial South African philosopher David Benatar, who wrote in his 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, that “so long as a life contains even the smallest quantity of bad, coming into existence is a harm.” This idea carries with it, in Benatar’s view, an obligation not to procreate; the duty to avoid harm far outweighs the possibility of bestowing a benefit, especially on someone whose consent cannot be obtained. (The logical conclusion of this view is eventual human extinction.) Benatar dismisses the notion of life being good and worth living as the product of the human tendency to hold more tightly to our positive experiences than negative or painful ones. But surely, as van der Lugt counters, “we are an authority on this, the value of our own lives?”

Still, the possibility of suffering does make any act of procreation a gamble with someone else’s life, irrespective of how valuable, good, or even sacred we deem our own lives, or human life in general. So how do we apply this bleak calculus to our individual choices? One’s intuitive response might be “to distinguish mere possibility from probability.” Most people, van der Lugt continues, likely believe, at least in the abstract, that we shouldn’t create people “who will most probably lead miserable lives,” such as a child with a hereditary disease that will cause them immense physical pain and an early death. But they probably wouldn’t argue that we “have a duty to avoid creating people who might just possibly lead miserable lives.” She is careful to note that making such a judgment on behalf of others is a dicey prospect, one reason she is unconvinced by some people’s assertion that life is, on net, bad. The late disability-rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson, for instance, asserted that the “presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life,” in response to arguments like those of the philosopher Peter Singer, who has said that parents should have the option to euthanize disabled babies if they judge that their infant’s life will be “so miserable as not to be worth living.”

Of course, this question of possibility versus probability falls unevenly on the shoulders of different groups. “Any child you bring into existence could be assaulted, raped, tortured, or murdered,” writes Benatar. “It could be sent to war. It could be kidnapped, abducted, imprisoned, or executed.” Well, yes. But in a profoundly unequal society, some people are, statistically, far more likely to suffer the sorts of harms that Benatar mentions. We know that Black Americans are about five times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons than white Americans. We know that in the U.S., women are seven times more likely to be rape victims than men. We know that the children of poor parents are far more likely to end up poor themselves.

Van der Lugt’s book does not engage enough with how we might figure these realities into discussions on begetting, or what the implications of doing so would be. Although she is clear that moral debates about childbirth should be kept separate from legal or policy guidelines, we have long lived in a society that regulates birth—either through racist and classist messages about who should and shouldn’t reproduce, or through legislation, such as the current broad restrictions on abortion in the United States. The Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 authorized sterilization for “imbeciles,” and in 1983 the Milwaukee legislature passed a bill that made artificially inseminating welfare recipients medical malpractice. Then there’s our insurance regime, in which Medicaid beneficiaries can generally get contraception but not fertility care. “Insurers pay for the poor to get birth control and for the rich to get IVF,” the historian Laura Briggs has written, a system underpinned by reasoning she calls “precisely eugenic.” If the logical end point of certain antinatalist arguments is that groups bearing the burden of living in an unjust society must subject their family planning to additional moral scrutiny, perhaps something is wrong with the premise.

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Probability and possibility come into play again in van der Lugt’s treatment of the climate crisis, which has generated ambivalence about begetting; these hesitations have been perhaps most loudly voiced by people—white, middle-class, college-educated—whose reproduction has historically been encouraged. She acknowledges that the apparent inexorability of climate change makes the possibility of suffering far more of a certainty for many more people. “If there is anything we can be certain of, it is that the world is changing, and not for the better,” she writes. Yet to say that creating children is a uniquely vexed question today is to engage in what van der Lugt calls “temporal exceptionalism,” because life involves pain no matter what. Even if we were to solve climate change tomorrow, she points out, the concerns raised by the antinatalists—the potential harm and horror of human life—are still on the table. “When the question of climate has been answered, the question of begetting remains,” she writes.

Are there any good reasons to have children? Van der Lugt finds all of the most common ones wanting. Among the “worse reasons” she cites are “to remain ‘in-step’ with [one’s] peers,” to save a relationship, or out of fear of regret or missing out. Uncritically accepting “the Biological Narrative,” as she calls “the language of biology, of hormones, of physical urges,” demeans the procreative act. Giving little credence to the evolutionary drive to propagate the human species, she instead suggests that “we might do better to emphasise not the urge itself, but the ability consciously to act, or not to act, upon it.” Other stock answers on the “better” end of the spectrum, such as “happiness, fulfillment, meaningfulness,” are also deemed insufficient. In van der Lugt’s view, expecting a child to provide those things places too great a burden on the child. Even the most obvious reason, “love” (my instinctive answer), is dismissed as logically inadequate. “Even if it is possible to experience love for a non-existent child,” van der Lugt writes, “love alone cannot justify all things.” After all, she notes, when it comes to existing people, mere love (or what she says is more accurately termed “longing” in the case of a child one hasn’t yet met) is not an adequate reason to do anything to them without their consent.

If the question has no one simple answer, it is still, van der Lugt insists, vital to ask it, and to ask it in the correct way, using language that moves away from entitlement and desire (“having” or “wanting” children) and toward “a concept of fragility and accountability”—the idea that we are entrusted with children, responsible for them. Although many people speak of childbearing as “giving the gift of life,” van der Lugt argues that this unidirectional characterization is mistaken. “If life is ‘given’ at all, it is given both to the parents and to the child: neither is giver, but to both it is bestowed,” she writes.

Thus, perhaps, one possible approach to begetting is to begin with humility, combined with a deep appreciation for the fragility of existence. Van der Lugt’s model for this stance is once again Etty Hillesum. Writing in the Nazi transit camp of Westerbork, where she remained for several months before boarding a train to Poland, where she and her family were killed, Hillesum insists that “life is glorious and magnificent,” even as she bears witness to the misery around her. Her searching examination of her own existence left her full of gratitude, yet still did not compel her to give life to someone else, for how could she insist, or predict, that that person might face the adversity she experienced with the same extraordinary grace. As van der Lugt writes, “The principle of gratitude and acceptance, according to which life is worth living ‘despite everything,’ is one that she applies firmly to herself, but only hesitatingly to others.”

Those who do choose to beget might also adopt this same humility. Bidding someone forth, conjuring a new person from a couple of cells, is an act of tremendous magnitude, one whose meaning is perhaps too great and abstract to grasp or articulate with any precision. Before undertaking it, we should commit to the same unsparing self-examination. This, in the end, is van der Lugt’s request of us: to pose the question of begetting to ourselves, and to answer it for only ourselves.